John Irving - Until I Find You

The moviegoers, meaning the Mishima crowd, were in no mood to be greeted by kneeling Catholics and “Hail Mary”—not with Mishima’s disembowelment fresh on their minds. (Nor would Mishima have been amused, Jack thought; at least when he was disemboweling himself, he looked like a pretty serious guy.)

Claudia and Jack took Miss Wurtz to a party. They had no trouble crashing parties; the bouncers wouldn’t have kept Claudia out of a men’s room, if she’d wanted to go into one. Claudia said they got into parties because Jack looked like a movie star, but Claudia was the reason. With Miss Wurtz in tow, it was clear they got in because of her. In fact, they were leaving one such party when a young man approached Caroline in a fawning fashion; he’d snatched a flower from a vase on the bar and pressed it into her hand. “I love your work!” he told her, disappearing into the crowd.

“I freely admit I don’t remember him at all,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “I can’t be expected to recognize every grade-three boy I ever taught,” she said to Claudia. “They were not all as memorable as Jack!”

Claudia and Jack were quite certain that the young man had not been referring to Caroline’s teaching career. But how to explain all this to The Wurtz—well, why would Claudia or Jack have bothered?

In the lineup of limos outside a restaurant, Jack recognized an old friend among the drivers. “Peewee!” he cried.

The big Jamaican got out of his limo and embraced Jack on the sidewalk, lifting him off his feet. That was when the Hail Mary protesters must have assumed that Jack was the cabdriver boyfriend in the Godard film—the Joseph character—which made Claudia, in their demented eyes, the pregnant gas-station attendant who was an updated version of the Virgin Mary. (God knows who they thought Miss Wurtz was.)

“Jack Burns, you are already a star, mon!” Peewee exclaimed, hugging him so hard that he couldn’t breathe.

The Catholics, crawling around on their knees, were an unsettling experience for Claudia, and Caroline was fed up with their zealotry. “Oh, why don’t you go home and read his books !” Miss Wurtz told one of the kneelers. She was a young woman whose face was streaked with grime and tears. Jack could see her thinking: Christ was a writer?

The other Catholics kept repeating the infuriating “Hail Mary.”

“Quick, get in the car, Jack!” Peewee said. He was already holding the door open for Claudia and Caroline.

“It’s Mrs. Wicksteed’s driver, dear—don’t be alarmed,” Miss Wurtz told Claudia. (As if Mrs. Wicksteed were still in need of a driver!) But Claudia was having her legs held, at the thighs, by a kneeling Catholic. “Let her go, you craven imbecile,” Caroline told the Catholic. “Don’t you get it? He killed himself because he wanted his life to merge with his art.”

Miss Wurtz meant Mishima, of course, but the Catholic who reluctantly released Claudia thought that Caroline was talking about Christ. He was an indignant-looking man—bald, middle-aged—in a long-sleeved white dress shirt of a thin see-through material, with a pen that had leaked in his breast pocket. He looked like a deranged income-tax auditor.

Peewee managed to get Claudia into the car, but Miss Wurtz was facing down the mob of kneelers. “The man was Japanese and he wanted to off himself,” she told them in a huff. “Just get over it!”

To a one, the Catholics looked as if no number of repetitions of “Hail Mary” could redeem such a slur on the unfortunate Christ as this. Jesus was Japanese ?

Jack put an arm around Caroline’s slender waist as if she were his dance partner. “Miss Wurtz, they’re all insane,” he whispered in her ear. “Get in the car.”

“My goodness—you’ve become so worldly, Jack,” she told him, stooping to get into the backseat of the limo. Claudia caught her by the hand and pulled her inside; Peewee shoved Jack inside after her, closing the door.

One of the protesters had wrapped her arms around Peewee’s knees, but when he began to walk with her, dragging her to the driver’s-side door of the limo, she thought better of it and let him go. Jack had no idea which actual movie star had Peewee for a limo driver that evening—Peewee claimed that he couldn’t remember—but Peewee drove Miss Wurtz home first, then Claudia and Jack.

Jack had never known where The Wurtz lived, but he was unsurprised when Peewee stopped the limo at a large house on Russell Hill Road, which was within walking distance of St. Hilda’s. Jack was somewhat surprised when Miss Wurtz asked Peewee to drive around to the back entrance, where an outside staircase led to her small, rented apartment.

Where had the money for Caroline’s once-fashionable clothes come from? If it had been family money from Edmonton, it must have been spent. Had she ever had a suitor, or a secret lover with good taste? If there’d ever been a well-to-do ex-boyfriend—or more improbably, an ex-husband—he was long gone, clearly.

Miss Wurtz would not let Jack accompany her up the stairs to her modest rooms. Possibly she did not think it proper to bring a young man to her apartment; yet she allowed Claudia to go with her. Jack sat in the limo with Peewee and watched them turn on some lights.

Later, when Jack pressed Claudia to describe The Wurtz’s apartment, Claudia became irritated. “I didn’t snoop around,” she said. “She’s an older woman—she has too much stuff, things she should have thrown away. Out-of-date magazines, junk like that.”

“A TV?”

“I didn’t see one, but I wasn’t looking.”

“Photographs? Any pictures of men ?”

“Jesus, Jack! Have you got the hots for her, or something?” Claudia asked.

They lay in Emma’s bed—bereft of the stuffed animals, which either Emma or Mrs. Oastler had disposed of. Jack couldn’t remember a single one of them—nor could he dispel from his memory that Emma had taught him how to masturbate as he lay in her arms in the very same bed.

Given Claudia’s bitchy mood, Jack decided to spare her that detail.

The parties and intrigues of the film festival notwithstanding, Claudia and Jack spent the lion’s share of their time in Toronto at Daughter Alice—at least Claudia did. Jack frequently escaped the tattoo parlor, preferring the clientele in the nearby Salvation Army store to many of his mother’s devotees.

Aberdeen Bill had been a maritime man—like Charlie Snow and Sailor Jerry, like Tattoo Ole and Tattoo Peter and Doc Forest. They were Alice’s mentors. But the tattoo world had changed; while Daughter Alice still did the occasional Man’s Ruin, or the broken heart that sustains a sailor for long months at sea, a new vulgarity exhibited itself on the skin of young men seeking to be marked for life.

Gone was the romance of those North Sea ports—and the steady sound of his mom’s tattoo machine, which had lulled Jack to sleep as a child. Gone were those brave girls in the Hotel Torni: Ritva, whose breasts he never saw, and Hannele’s unshaven armpits and her striking birthmark—that crumpled top hat over her navel, the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.

Jack had once been so bold as to march up to anyone and ask: “Do you have a tattoo?” In the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, he’d told that beautiful girl: “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (And to think it was his idea for his mom to offer the littlest soldier a free tattoo!)

In his sleep, Jack heard the vast organ in the Oude Kerk playing to the prostitutes at night; even awake, if he shut his eyes, he could feel the thick, waxed rope and the smooth, wooden handrail on the other side of the old church’s twisting stairs.